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JD VANCE’S “CHILDLESS CAT LADIES” COMMENT POINTS TO THE GOP’S
RIGHT-WING MEDIA PROBLEM  
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Matt Gertz
July 26, 2024
Media Matters for America
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_ The GOP’s far-right infotainers have become a critical GOP power
center that its aspiring politicians must court if they wish to rise
within the party ranks. That's a problem for the GOP. _

JD Vance and Tucker Carlson, by Andrea Austria / Media Matters

 

Nakedly misogynistic comments that Ohio Sen. JD Vance made during a
2021 Fox News appearance spurred a massive backlash
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resurfacing this week. Vance’s description of Democratic leaders
including Vice President Kamala Harris as “childless cat ladies”
who “don't really have a direct stake” in the country has been
roundly condemned, drawing fire from across the political spectrum and
fueling the argument that former President Donald Trump made a
mistake
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selecting Vance as his running mate.

But Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comments fit comfortably
alongside the unbridled
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has infested
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years and has been unleashed
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Harris’ ascension to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. 

The fallout from Vance’s remarks points to a broader problem for the
Republican Party. In recent years, the GOP’s far-right infotainers
have become a critical GOP power center
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its aspiring politicians must court if they wish to rise within the
party ranks. But those figures are weirdos
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and winning them over requires adopting their combination of bizarre
fixations, paranoid conspiracy theories, and culture-war resentment
politics — a toxic combination that Americans outside the right-wing
media bubble find deeply off-putting.

Vance was trying to win over Tucker Carlson and his audience

Vance’s remarks came during a July 29, 2021, interview on Tucker
Carlson’s Fox program.

“We're effectively run in this country, via the Democrats it, be it
via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who
are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and
so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too,” Vance
told Carlson.

“And it's just a basic fact,” he continued. “You look at Kamala
Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is
controlled by people without children, and how does it make any sense
that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a
direct stake in it?” 

(Harris is stepmother
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two children from her husband’s first marriage, Buttigieg and his
husband were at the time preparing to adopt twins
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the right is apparently incapable
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[[link removed]] Rep.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) without
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insane
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Vance’s comments were not anomalous. He has for years deployed
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as a pejorative against his political foes and sneered at Harris and
other political leaders without biological children when speaking
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audiences
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Indeed, the Trump campaign has tried to clean up Vance’s comments
by claiming
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were taken out of context
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rebuttal points to a speech he gave at the conservative
Intercollegiate Studies Institute five days before his Carlson
appearance in which he made similar arguments
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Vance took a somewhat softer tone during that address, specifying that
he was only taking aim at people who choose not to have children, not
those who “struggled to find the right girl, find the right guy”
or those who “for biological, medical reasons … can’t have
children.” 

But Vance offered no such caveats in his interview with Carlson, who
brought him on to respond to the backlash from the ISI speech.
Instead, Vance turned up the hyper-aggression and resentment, and he
attributed the criticism he had received to “miserable cat lady”
journalists who “hate normal Americans for choosing family over
these ridiculous D.C. and New York status games.” 

The resulting clip may appeal to Carlson and his audience — but it
is radioactive outside the right-wing media bubble.

Vance’s comments came as he was retooling his public persona
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appeal to the Ohio Republican primary electorate, in part by mimicking
Carlson’s own maximally cruel affect and obsessions. Indeed,
Vance’s reference to “cat ladies” during his July 29, 2021,
interview echoed language Carlson used earlier in the same broadcast
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describe Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Vance won over Carlson, and that relationship has proven crucial to
his rise in GOP politics
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Carlson showered Vance with airtime and accolades during his Senate
primary bid and privately urged Trump to grant the crucial endorsement
that secured his victory. Carlson’s intervention with the former
president may also have proven pivotal
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Vance’s selection as the vice presidential pick. 

People like Carlson are GOP kingmakers — and that’s a huge problem
for the party

Carlson was the lodestar of the right-wing media ecosystem
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a Fox host and following his defenestration from that network
now hosts
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popular podcast. But his influence in right-wing politics exceeds his
media role: He can make or break
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primary candidates, addressed
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Republican National Convention on its final night, and has the ear of
the Republican presidential and vice presidential nominees.

Carlson’s influence is a massive liability
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the GOP because he is a weirdo who is wildly out of touch with the
concerns of normal Americans. He favors the blood-and-soil nationalism
of European autocrats from poor countries. He spends a lot of time
making excuses for the Trumpists who stormed the U.S. Capital, finding
ways to compliment Vladimir Putin, and talking about children’s
genitals. His rants about global elites importing brown foreigners to
replace “legacy Americans” resemble the manifestos of mass
shooters. He has complained that the green and brown M&Ms have become
distressingly unsexy. 

GOP candidates who want to appeal to Carlson either need to actually
share those bizarre values, obsessions, and rhetoric, or pretend that
they do. Either way, they may boost their chances of success in
Republican primaries, but they end up losing ground once they need to
defend themselves to a broader audience. 

Vance dramatically underperformed but narrowly won his Senate seat
because Ohio is such a red state. But Blake Masters,
another Carlson-like candidate
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lost his Senate race in Arizona, a fate quite common
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the candidates Carlson got behind in 2022.

Carlson isn’t the only right-wing media weirdo with a hold on the
GOP — the movement is filled with people whose hateful rhetoric and
conspiracy theories garnered them huge audiences within the GOP but
made them toxic outside it.

This week alone, Vance is also facing criticism
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blurbing the book of podcaster Jack Posobiec, a notorious Pizzagate
conspiracy theorist whose tome, titled Unhumans, claims progressives
“oppose everything that makes up humanity.” 

Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr. drew fire for headlining a planned
fundraiser
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Candace Owens, a podcaster whose extreme rhetoric
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included Holocaust denial and discussions of the excessive power she
has suggested Jews hold in the United States.

Owens was subsequently replaced
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program by Carlson, which is not much of an improvement
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* JD Vance
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* Tucker Carlson
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* Republican Party
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